Conventionally, the applicant of the present application has proposed printing apparatuses that print a title of an optical disk such as CD-R (Compact Disk-Recordable) on its surface, and has sold such printing apparatuses in Japan.
This type of printing apparatus includes a tray that supports a disk and a printer mechanism that performs printing to the disk supported by the tray. The tray is moved to an external section of a main body of the printing apparatus by an eject operation. The printer mechanism performs thermal transfer printing to an optical disk, which is supported on the tray provided at a predetermined position in the main body of the printing apparatus and which is in a stationary state, using an ink ribbon by a thermal head that moves back and forth.
In the aforementioned printer mechanism, printing is performed to the surface of the optical disk in one rectangular range, which corresponds to an effective print width that the thermal head has and a distance where the thermal head moves and scans, by one print operation.
Accordingly, in a case where a user desires to provide printing to a plurality of portions of the surface (label surface) of the optical disk by the printer mechanism, the user must carry out the following operations. Namely, the user once pushes the tray out of the printing apparatus by the eject operation after printing one portion. Then, in order that an area, which is opposite to a print area at the first print around a hole of the disk, is made correspond to the position of the printer mechanism, the user rotates the optical disk on the tray at 180° manually to be reset and turns the tray to the main body of the printing apparatus. Then, printing is performed to the different portion by a second print operation of the printer mechanism.
This printing apparatus is one that performs printing to a predetermined area on the surface of the optical disk in a state that the optical disk is stood still. Since the area printable by one printing operation is a limited size against the entire surface of the optical disk, there is a case that the user desires to expand the print area to provide printing to a plurality of portions.
In this case, according to this type of printing apparatus, the tray must be once ejected to change the placement of optical disk to perform printing, repeatedly.
In other words, according to this type of printing apparatus, every time when one print processing ends, the tray must be ejected to the external section of the printing apparatus that can attach/detach the optical disk thereto/therefrom. Moreover, such a complicated task is needed that the positioning is performed on the tray to change the placement of optical disk manually and the tray is turned to the main body of printing apparatus to restart the printing operation. For this reason, efficiency of printing work will be reduced.
Further, there conventionally have been proposed another type of printing apparatuses that print a title on the optical disk, such as one disclosed in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. H5-238005. Specifically, such a printing apparatus is an ink jet printing apparatus that moves a print head thereof in a radial direction of the optical disk while rotating the optical disk thereby to perform printing on the optical disk in a spiral manner, or that drives a print head thereof which is provided to be extended in a radial direction of the optical disk as rotating the optical disk and thereby performs printing.
Since this type of printing apparatus performs printing in a spiral manner by rotating an optical disk and moving a print head thereof in the radial direction of the optical disk, the rotation of the optical disk and the movement of the print head need to be controlled together, resulting in a problem that such a control is complicated.
Further, this type of printing apparatus is one that performs printing by driving the print head that extends in the radial direction of the optical disk and by once rotating the optical disk. According to this printing apparatus, the rotational speed at a position close to the center of the optical disk is different from the rotation speed at a position away from the center. Since a moving speed to the print head is low at the position close to the center, a print result with high density is obtained. Contrary to this, the moving speed to the print head is high at the position away from the center, so that a print result with low density is obtained. For this reason, it is necessary to perform specific print control to equalize print density at the position in the radial direction of the optical disk, resulting in considerable complicated control.
Moreover, since it is necessary to perform the rotational drive of optical disk and the drive of print head at the same time, a drive power supply must be enlarged.